Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner [265]
“Don’t tell me too much,” Henry James is supposed to have said, when some anecdote vibrated his web and alerted him to the prospect of a story. “Don’t tell me too much!” But he was not writing biography, and he had no personal stake in what he did. He could invent within the logic of a situation. I have to invent within a body of inhibiting facts that I wish were otherwise. If I had had Shelly put them in chronological order I might be able to start in on those clippings in some business-like way, but I have not shown them to Shelly. I ran through them with the avidity of a thief counting his loot when they first came, and then I stuffed them back into their envelope, unwilling to do the peephole detective work they seemed to demand.
But if I don’t do it, what do I do? Stop? She has kept me alive all summer, that woman. I have been her private werewolf. I know, furthermore, that my reluctance to expose her trouble is calculated to spare myself, not her. What point is there in sparing a woman who has been dead more than thirty years? So I will do it like fortune telling. I will start at the top of that little stack of clippings and read down through them and see what they tell me.
The first one is a very brief notice, a pencil-encircled paragraph from the “Of Local Interest” column for July 22, 1890. It says that Mrs. Oliver Ward, accompanied by her son Oliver junior and her daughter Elizabeth, left on that day to visit relatives at the East, and to put young Oliver in school in New Hampshire.
Either because his readers would all have been full of the affairs of the Oliver Wards and the London and Idaho Canal Company, or out of some feeling of charity or compassion, the editor says no more than that–nothing about the events that for two weeks have been the sensation of the town. And at once, with his bare notice of Susan’s departure, he presents me with a question that is unanswerable by reference to any of the known facts.
From later letters, I know that Grandmother delivered my father to St. Paul’s sometime around the first of August, a good month before school opened. Since they left Boise on July 22, and would have taken the best part of a week crossing the continent, she could have paused in Milton only two or three days before taking him on to Concord.
Why that haste? They were all stunned, distracted, grieving, shot to bits. Why wouldn’t that mother have kept the remains of her family around her? Wouldn’t her silent manly boy have been a comfort to her, wouldn’t she have felt that she should be near to comfort him? I suppose she may have felt uncomfortable about throwing herself on the mercy of Bessie and John, after the loss and disappointment those two had had on account of her and hers. But Bessie was the warmest and most affectionate of sisters; in the circumstances she would have opened every door and room and heart in her house to Susan and her children. And even if Susan felt that she herself shouldn’t or couldn’t stay, why wouldn’t she have left Ollie to have a healthy and healing time with his cousins on the farm? He was big enough and handy enough to be a help to John, and he would certainly have been happier there than moping around in a deserted school with his loneliness and misery. Yet his mother snatched him away from Milton after barely forty-eight hours, and took him up to Concord and unloaded him on Dr. Rhinelander as she might have sped an unwelcome visitor.
Why?
All her life she spoke of Dr. Rhinelander with gratitude, because that summer and two summers thereafter he took Ollie in with his own family, carried